Swift Judicial Action To Curb Sex Crimes
TODAY and Philippine Daily Inquirer on January 05, 1999 and
Manila Times on January 06, 1999
Killing convicts achieves nothing. What we need to deter child abusers is swift judicial action for children with long prison sentences. It keeps them from abusing other children. The death penalty does not deter crimes of rape and child sexual molestation. Our experience in providing legal assistance to victims of rape, especially incest, is that the victim is reluctant to pursue her complaint against her abuser if it means sending him to his death. Their family pressures the victim to withdraw charges. That is why the PREDA Children's Home becomes the official complainant, and the child the witness.
The specter of death by lethal injection wills the abusers to extreme measures. They may bribe officials all the more, frame up another, abduct or threaten the child or her family, threaten the childcare workers, file multiple countercharges. Our day-to-day experience monitoring the 60-plus cases of child incest and commercial exploitation is proof of this.
More effective than the death penalty, which should be repealed, is the need for President Estrada and his officials to support Secretary Cuevas, a man of integrity and of no religious discrimination that we note. He needs the full backing of the cabinet to implement reforms in the Department of Justice to weed out the corrupt and install the honest and appoint more special prosecutors for child-abuse cases.
Instead of killing the convicts, we need the President to advance his pro-poor agenda by assuaging the hunger of the poor, if not that in their stomachs, then that of their hearts, with justice, for which they hunger greatly.
We need the President to help the weak and the downtrodden rather than for him to hobnob with the rich and the elite. While these people wallow in luxury, children are being raped, exploited and abandoned by government officials who are derelict in their duties.
In Mariveles, Bataan, for example, the investigating municipal judge let a suspected child-rapist go free and jailed the mother of the victim. We complained to the Supreme Court but the judge is still there. In Olongapo, another judge takes a seven-year-old victim of sexual abuse from protective custody and returns her to the house of the abusers. One of the two 12-year-old abusers admits his crime and reveals more serious abuse by the child's (non-biological) American father to another minor. The higher authorities ignore the children's plight and coddle the American suspect. The child remains in the power of her abusers. The American and pedophile supporters attack the children's home, blame us for the rape, while authorities ignore our appeals for help.
What hope is there for children and those of us on the front line battling paedophiles and child-rapists faced with such dereliction of duty?
We don't need executions, we need the rule of law to help the victims, and a more effective government response to the sexual abuse of children.
FR. SHAY CULLEN, Mssc
PREDA Foundation
& Staff of the PREDA
Children's Home
Olongapo City
